Software Freedom Law Center News

1. Mishi Choudhary Departs SFLC

   After 17 years with SFLC, Legal Director Mishi Choudhary will depart to become General Counsel and Senior Vice-President at Virtru.

   Ms. Choudhary began working with SFLC in 2006, held the first SFLC Graduate Fellowship for LLM study at Columbia Law School, and became Legal Director in 2015. She has represented SFLC clients across the entire range of FOSS communities, including the Free Software Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Linux Foundation, Debian, Ethereum, the Apache Software Foundation, and OpenSSL. She founded and developed SFLC’s FOSS Code of Conduct practice, assisting FOSS non-profits and unaffiliated projects to develop and administer CoC policies. She has served as the Code of Conduct mediator for the Linux kernel community, among many others.

2. SFLC Files Amicus Brief in Google v. Oracle

   On January 13th, 2020, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) filed a brief amicus curiae in Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. before the United States Supreme Court. In its brief, SFLC argues (1) that the Federal Circuit erred in reversing the District Court’s determination that a reasonable jury could find Google’s use of Java in Android was a fair use; (2) that the Supreme Court should ensure the Federal Circuit’s decision that APIs are copyrightable does not establish precedent; and (3) that the Federal Circuit is bound to follow the precedent of the regional courts of appeals on questions of copyright law.

   The brief is available to download as a pdf.

3. Eben Moglen Delivers "FreedomBox Turns Ten" Speech

   On Saturday, November 16th, the Software Freedom Law Center co-hosted a hackathon with the FreedomBox Foundation to commemorate the upcoming ten-year anniversary of the FreedomBox project’s founding. At the hackathon, Eben Moglen delivered a speech in which he reflected on the past ten years of FreedomBox and the project’s future.

4. Media for SFLC’s 2019 Fall Conference Now Published

   We are pleased to announce that video recordings of our 2019 Fall Conference are now available in several formats. At this year’s fall conference, leaders from community and industry joined us in New York to discuss the pressing issues of the day, from Cambridge Analytica and the regulation of social media companies to software distribution and the limits of copyright. This year, we also welcomed a diverse panel for a discussion about FOSS in Asia.

5. Program for 15th Anniversary Fall Conference

   In a few short weeks, the Software Freedom Law Center will welcome guests to our 15th Anniversary Fall Conference cohosted by Columbia Law School on Friday, November 1st, 2019. We are pleased to announce our conference program, which may be updated in the coming weeks. SFLC’s free annual conference explores the current legal issues surrounding free and open source software (FOSS). As in previous years, our conference will be attended by counsel, developers, enterprise users, and other members of FOSS communities.